I may have borrowed the title of this post from a vintage Ben and Jerry’s ice cream flavor* (*= spelt in the American to honour the All-American theme here!).  But this pie delivers big time and deserves the exclamation oh my! 

Now onto the who, what and why.

Firstly – why?  I had 7 wee gala apples that were starting to soften that would have (ashamedly) ended up in the bin if not baked, having lost their crispness.

What – the All American Apple Pie from Baking From My Home to Yours

WhoDorie Greenspan, my pastry idol (and a total cutie pants from what I’ve seen of her in the videos in her excellent Baking App).

I discovered this book via a friend who has had it for some time and baked most of its recipes.
Nicola had been raving about this pie for so long I just knew I had to try it.  So I got my book out, set my app up to show me how to crimp pastry just like Dorie does and got a-baking. 

The pastry was a total dream to handle – soft and silky as well as amenable to rerolling without toughening up the texture.  Plus, I felt justified in keeping my pastry on the thick side as Dorie said in her app that’s how she likes it (Mary Berry went on record on the Great British Bake Off saying such pastry must be thin and crisp to be good – sorry Mary, but on this, I disagree!).

As for the pie filling – so easy!  Just a case of chopping apples and tossing with a few other ingredients.  Now here’s were my tweaks came – I used cornflour instead of tapioca (as I didn’t have any) and I used the zest of an orange plus some of it’s juice to moisten and coat the apples to prevent them browning.  I love apple and orange together.

Then, I used 4 finely crushed amaretti biccies (the packet was open and needed using up) instead of 2tbsp crushed Graham crackers – a rather genius addition on Dorie’s part as you can’t actually taste them in the finished pie but they sop up the wonder juices of the baking fruit thus minimising the Soggy Bottom!

Other than that, I was very well behaved and followed Dorie’s instructions exactly and this is what I ended up with (I’m grinning like an idiot here, I’m soooo pleased with this pie!):

Prompted by Dorie’s suggestion, I rerolled the excess pastry and cut out these leaf designs to use up the pastry and well, to give an extra thick crust as we do love the pastry as much as the filling, and there certainly is plenty of both in this pie. 

The aroma of orange and baked pastry wafted out of my oven and filled the flat with a warm cosy feeling – there is nothing quite like a homemade apple pie in this world to wrap you up in a big fluffy blanky and soothe you, comfort you and remind you it may be time-consuming to make your own pie but Oh My!  Is it worth it!

Hungry Hubby finds it hard to nail down which is his favourite pudding but still warm apple pie and cold, cold vanilla ice cream are a combination we both love to share if it’s on the menu when we’re out for dinner.  Luckily, this time, we could snuggle on our own couch and munch this up uninterrupted.

Hubs devoured the second piece after his serving and looked rather put out that I said no to thirds – that’s how good it is. Next time, I would use more apples as I’m looking for that characteristic All-American humped up, domed pie appearance. 

I would use gala apples again – they are so naturally very, very sweet I only needed to add 2tbsp caster sugar to the pie filling rather than the 3/4 cup Dorie instructs (you’d definitely need it if you were using Bramley apples).  But apart from that, this is the Perfect Pie with the addition of orange elevating it to ethereally good.

Here’s a cheeky link to the recipe 😉

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